My Writing Day/Night

      Writing a book is soooo much fun! I'm sitting there all by myself in my spare bedroom turned office, typing away on my keyboard, making up these characters, setting them in a real background which takes a lot of research, finding the right words, thank goodness for the inbuilt Thesaurus, my backside stuck to the bottom of the chair and I can feel it spreading. Ever noticed a truck driver's flat bottom? I'm worried.
     Then there's the interruptions: the phone rings, time to go out to lunch, one's gotta eat, then take a little nap, pay a few bills, put in the wash, etc. etc. and before you know it, it's dinner and a show or an art opening and it's 10 p.m. When I had a real job I put in 8 to 10 hours every day and when I retired and started the writing gig, I set a goal of at least 8 hrs a day, like a workday, then it came to 6, and now its 4, usually from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.
     You can't imagine how quiet it is at that time: no phone, no one knocks at the door, not even the dogs bark that late. Everybody is asleep and the world is silent. In the country where I lived before moving to town,  nighttime had it's symphony, frogs croaking, crickets chirping, but these little creatures don't like to live on concrete, so their music is missing in town. It took me a while to get accustomed to no night sounds, except the choo-choo train that rattles through at 2 p.m. and that took a little adjusting, but now I don't even hear it.
       Last Friday, however, I had a deadline to enter the Amazon novel contest, which I know I won't win because it's one of those popularity robo-voting things and my computer savvy friends are limited, but Cuba on My Mind got published because I entered a contest I didn't win, so what the heck, and I stayed up and....